Very interesting.

“gives those filled with hate nowhere to go?”

Perhaps so.
Though if people are somehow not “allowed” by the mainstream to say what they really think/feel then alas they may well find somewhere much more sinister to go.

Well, I for one felt horror when someone told me what was happening on 9/11. My initial reaction was one of total disbelief. It took me time to check it out and confirm it was true, before I accepted it. Then I was mad as hell.

So, contrary to the opinion I am being fed, I think Martin Amis was being honest about the immediate, emotional reaction to terrorism. Without being too blunt about it, you want to find the fuckers and kill them. It is the immediate fight or flight response. In my case it was fight, and given the impossibility of actual flight, it was the only available option.

Quite how that, frankly extreme, and immediate, response, gets manipulated for other ends is probably going to fill libraries from now until kingdom come.

And, err…, apart from that ridiculous fight / flight reaction, I don’t hate Muslims. Personally, I think they have been demonised, much like Jews were by Christians for killing Christ. It is a nonsense. The they did not do it. It was specific Muslims with specific agenda’s that did it. How come the KSA and Yemen weren’t invaded?

But understanding our own immediate responses is probably a worthwhile thing.

While agreeing with comments from chrisc and douglas, I recoil from the phrase “Those who do not aspire to join the political or intellectual elite”. The intellectual elite should be both self-regulating and have members labelled as such by public acclaim, so do well and you largely get in – self-improvement driven by aspiration. The political elite is a power block, today here largely disregarded or even reviled as a group, but individuals within it stand out like beacons and yet are often sidelined. Aspiring to join our current political elite is not a trait that I admire, but aspiring to be an effective politician is something quite different. LDs need to work for quality (and that includes local govt as well as the central arenas).

“The language of modern politics cannot express the desire for destruction, abuse and selfishness, it can only express rational desires to better society.”

Indeed. But isn’t that the problem ? Even if you accept that attempts to tramell debate towards rationality are genuine and well intentioned (and I don’t) , emotion is necesarily removed, leaving only a pick and mix of fashionable causes which are really nothing more than Islington dinner party conversation menus. “Having the debate” has become an end in itself, which wouldn’t be problematic (who really cares what guardinistas talk about at dinner parties ?) except that a sizeable chunk of society (the uneducated/unelightened/other polite euphamism for white working class) are excluded from that debate by virtue of their lack of aspiration towards rationality. If the liberal left are against anything it is surely elites, yet you wear your membership of them like a badge of honour.

Matt, thanks for the comment. I am emphatically not wearing my membership of the intellectual elite ‘like a badge of honour’. I think you may have misunderstood my article. I agree with you that rational debate can be bogus and exclusionary. What I tried to argue (perhaps with less clarity than I might have liked, for which I apologise to all) is that the conventions and assumptions of elite political discourse involve a level of pretence about one’s emotional commitments. This leads to perverse political phenomena.

The obnoxiousness of Amis, Clarkson and Littlejohn has nothing whatsoever to do with the merits or otherwise of their arguments. Until the real problems which they and many many others have, rightly or wrongly, with Islam are brought out into the open end candidly debated things will only get worse.

My problem has nothing to do with racism or dislike – much less hatred – of Muslims as human beings (I know some very nice ones), but with the very unclear but crucial issue of whether or not the doctrines of Islam are compatible with an open society and pluralistic democracy. As far as I understand it, Islam preaches theocracy, and makes no separation between religious law and the law of the land. If there are British Muslims who believe otherwise, we need to hear from them much more loudly.

Keith – Sorry I din’t mean you, as in you personally, I meant you as in the (generalised other) liberal left

Matt is right in illustrating the scope of understanding that leaders must have. “Having the debate” has become the excuse of the inadequate political elite. Once one such has proposed something inadequate, or proposed nothing at all, we discover we are talking to someone who either does not know what we are talking about, or else knows that his or her colleagues (euphemism for the next level up in the hierarchy) are inadequate to the task.